What Do Rick Perry and The New Foreign Minister of Guatemala Have In Common?

A couple of weeks ago we did a post about Guatemala and it's new president Otto Pérez Molina ties to human rights abuses during his years as a military commander. Today we came across another article about Harold Caballeros the new Foreign Minister of this Central American country. The post is by William Berkowitz at BuzzFlash.

"After taking office, Otto Pérez Molina appointed Harold Caballeros as head of the country's Foreign Ministry. Who is Harold Caballeros and why should we care that he has ascended to such a high government position?
Harold Caballeros and the New Apostolic Reformation
According to researcher and investigative journalist Bruce Wilson, Harold Caballeros has "links to government figures accused of human rights violations and perhaps death squads, and his demonizing of religious beliefs held by Guatemala's native Mayan population - targeted by the military for massacres and torture during Guatemala's civil war, raise troubling questions," Talk2Action's Bruce Wilson recently reported at the Talk2Action Web site.
In addition, Caballeros, the founder and senior pastor of El Shaddai Church in Guatemala City, has a close relationship with members of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The New Apostolic Reformation is still a relatively unknown and under-reported religious/political movement. It is the brainchild of C. Peter Wagner, a former Fuller Theological Seminary church-growth expert and partner of the now disgraced (but always poised for a comeback) Ted Haggard.
In a March 2010 interview for AlterNet, researcher Rachel Tabachnick explained how the New Apostolic Reformation functioned: "Imagine for a moment that a large block of the evangelical world decided to re-organize themselves in a hierarchy somewhat resembling the Roman Catholic Church, with leaders in authority over each nation and region. And additionally imagine that every person -- from the individual congregants to the top leaders -- would have someone to whom they are accountable. It seems unthinkable, but this is exactly what the ‘apostles' and ‘prophets' [of the NAR] are doing.
"This is not just a church movement. [Those called] market apostles work in business, finance, communications, media and also lead the Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture mandate. ... Apostles are also active providing social services, which Wagner describes as a method for accessing government and society."

To read the entire post click here.

The New Apostolic Reformation movement was also a big supporter of Rick Perry former Republican Presidental candidate. Here is a video providing more information on what they are about.

American Vote Fraud In The 21st Century

On our MindsiMedia blog on WordPress we have a series of posts called "American Racket. Debt Deregulation, Bubbles, Bailouts and GoldplatedLies" This is one from it if you like it follow the link.

Vote fraud played a role in the presidential elections of 2000 & 2004. Jeb Bush who was the governor of Florida in 2000 tried to help his brother get elected with a massive program to kick minority voters off  the list of eligible voters. In many cases people who didn’t deserve to be kicked off. Still once all the votes were counted Al Gore got the most votes. Unfortunately this wasn’t discovered until after the Supreme Court installed Bush.
Then in 2004 the battleground moved to Ohio where the Republican administration engaged in open voter suppression by making sure the safe Republican areas had all the voting machines they needed. While those areas where the Democrats were expected to do well got way fewer voting machines. So those voters had to sand in line for hours sometimes.
And before the election the owner of  Diebold the company that makes the voting machines said he would do anything to make sure Bush got reelected. Did he make something happen? Since, like the 2000 election, there was no investigation we don’t know for sure. We  do know that the final vote total was nowhere near what the exit polls had projected.
In both cases 2000 & 2004 the people in charge of overseeing the elections were also the co-chairs of the Bush election committees. We have also found out that hacking these voting machines is very easy. How easy? Here’s a story from todays news that shows just how easy it is.
From BradBlog By Brad Friedman

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control

Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated

“It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.
Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.
“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”
The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab’s scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor”
To read the entire story click here.


Here are a couple of videos that provide some further background.

 

The Growing Rebellion in Saudi Arabia

From The Global Mail by Jess Hill, February 24, 2012

Saudis are protesting. They've been protesting for over a year. Their numbers are growing. And there's no sign of them stopping.

It's all happening in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, home to most of the Kingdom's Shia minority, and 90 per cent of its oil. Seven people have been shot dead by Saudi security forces since October 2011, two in the past month alone. The Saudi Interior Ministry says these deaths resulted from gun battles
between protesters and police. But in all amateur videos that show protesters being shot, there is no evidence that protesters were shooting back.

To read the rest of this post click here.

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Feb 22, 2012

The Ken Eto Hit, Chicago Crime Now & Then

Uploaded by ChiTownView on Feb 23, 2012

The Chicago mafia unlike their counterparts in NY was open to non Italians who showed the right stuff. Ken Eto like his father before was a gambling racketeer for the mob. His specialty was operating a Latin version of the numbers game called the Bolita. Even though the state of IL. had introduced the lottery during the 70's there were still enough players loyal to Eto's racket that he was still employing nearly a hundred workers to operate it in the early 80's. Then he got indited by the Feds for felony gambling and for the first time in his life was looking at serious jail time. Not a good thing.

On the evening of February 10, 1983 Ken received an early Valentine gift from some old friends. He was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Mont Clare theater meeting with a couple of associates when they pulled out guns and pumped hot lead into him. They quickly exited the car and headed towards a waiting car.

A little too quickly though because they didn't finish the job because despite having a bullet in his head he was able to get out of the car and stagger into a nearby drug store. He lived and ended up turning on the mob and "singing" for the government. In fact this hit along with the botched coverup of the Spilotro hits proved to be the undoing of the Chicago mob in the final years of the 20th century. For while the Chicago outfit is still around they are not the force they were.

The Montclare and the drug store are both gone now as this quite little stretch of Grand Ave. gets redeveloped. It is in an area of the "Mafia riviera" of near western suburbs where the Italian gangsters relocated as they became wealthy. They settled in towns like Oak Park, River Forest and Elmwood Park.

As Pitchers & Catchers Report, Why The Baltimore Orioles Haven't Been To The World Series Since 1983

Uploaded by MindsiMedia on Aug 31, 2008

Drunken White Sox madness is featured in this video recorded in late 1983 we witness a
bizarre ritual in which the baseball card of Baltimore Oriole Great Cal Ripken Jr, is burned. This in retaliation for the defeat of the Sox by Baltimore in the 1983 playoffs. Cal of course went on to set a record for consecutive games played. So much for the curse. On the other had the Orioles have not been to the World Series since this was made. I'm not saying but ????
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http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php

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By Slanesh (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=266482) Zombis.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=31765)
By Vartan (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=238682) death_1.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=30298) 

Remember The War?

The war seems to have faded into the background for most people. Not for those who have loved ones (or themselves) caught up in it, but for most of us it's not part of our reality. Still everyday it sucks up millions of dollars and causes more death and destruction. So I thought for today we'd present a series of repots on America's quiet war.

From Salon by Gary Kamiya;
 Sunday, Feb 19, 2012 10:29 PM Central Standard Time

Hypnotized into an endless dirty war

America has decided it has the right to kill whoever it wants, whenever it wants. 

If in the year 2000 the U.S. president had told the American people that the government would soon begin using robot planes to track people, including U.S. citizens, all over the world, and would reserve to itself the right to kill them without trial, it is safe to say there would have been an enormous uproar. But that is exactly what is happening today, and nobody cares. The majority of Americans, including those who were opposed to the war in Iraq, have no problems with their government killing at will, so long as the killing is done in the name of “national security.”
How did this happen?

For the answer finish this post at Salon.

From The Guardian Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 February 2012 10.49 EST

Afghanistan Qur'an burning protests leave seven people dead

 Seven people have been killed in Afghanistan as violence spread across the country in a second day of protests against the burning of copies of the Qur'an by foreign troops. In Kabul an enraged crowd armed with stones and petrol bombs attacked a military base and a nearby compound housing foreign workers, shouting "Death to America".




To finish this story click here.

From the NY Times,  By ROD NORDLAND
Published: February 3, 2012

Driven Away by a War, Now Stalked by Winter’s Cold

After 10 years of a large international presence, comprising about 2,000 aid groups, at least $3.5 billion of humanitarian aid and $58 billion of development assistance, how could children be dying of something as predictable — and manageable — as the cold?

“The fact that every year there’s winter shouldn’t come as a surprise,” said Federico Motka, whose German aid group, Welthungerhilfe, is one of the few at work in these camps, which aid workers call the Kabul informal settlements — since describing what they actually are, camps for displaced persons or war refugees, is politically sensitive. The Afghan government insists that the residents should and could return to their original homes; the residents say it is too dangerous for them to do so.

The deaths occurred at two of the largest camps, Charahi Qambar (8 cold-related deaths), and Nasaji Bagrami (14 such deaths). Both camps are populated largely with refugees who fled the fighting in areas like Helmand Province in the south. Some people have been in the camps for as long as seven years; others arrived in the past year.

“There are 35,000 people in those camps in the middle of Kabul, with no heat or electricity in the middle of winter; that’s a humanitarian crisis,” said Michael Keating, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan. “I just don’t think the humanitarian story is sufficiently understood here. You’ve got a lot of people who really are in dire straits.” 

To finish this story click here.

And now a couple of videos the first is almost four years old and the second has material that's more than twenty years old and just think how little has changed.

Has Telling The Truth Become Treason? Wikileaks & Ron Paul

As most of the nation is distracted by endless breads, circuses and disasters government is moving ahead full speed on curtailing our liberties.Where ever you turn you see the press under attack, the truth being suppressed, fear and propaganda casing us to surrender our rights. Today two stories that center around Wikileaks one of which also features Ron Paul.

First we have this story I found on CommonDreams about how Wikileaks has been stopped from attending a UN conference looking at, the impact of Wikileaks.

Published on Thursday, February 16, 2012 by Common Dreams

Wikileaks Banned From UN Conference on Wikileaks

UNESCO opens 2-day media conference in Paris

- Common Dreams staff

WikiLeaks has lodged a strong protest with the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) for “banning’’ it from an international conference it is hosting at its headquarters in Paris on the impact of the whistle blower website’s activities.

It said the U.S. organizers of the two-day conference, which opened on Thursday, had “stacked’’ it with WikiLeaks’ opponents and “blocked all speakers from WikiLeaks, stating that the decision to censor WikiLeaks representation was an exercise in 'freedom of expression... our right to give voice to speakers of our choice'’."

* * *

UNESCO describes the 2-day conference on their website:

The conference “The Media World after WikiLeaks and News of the World” aims to gather leading media representatives, professional and “citizen” journalists and media law experts to exchange views on these issues and to discuss good practices in traditional professional journalism and citizen journalism in the digital era.

To finish this post click here.

And in this video we have Ron Paul discussing the Wikileaks revelations that the White House gave Saddam Hussein a green light to invade Iraq. But the information was classified so the truth never got out and our response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is what set off this war that has gone on since then.

There is much about Ron Paul's views that I dislike but I cannot help but admire him for the eloquence that he has consistently brought to the whole issue of "the war". In his best line he remarks how sad it is that we have come to see telling the truth as treason.